Graphics card manufacturer Sparkle has just announced a new offering built around Nvidia's Geforce 9 chipset. The GeForce 9600 GT 1GB comes with a whole gigabyte of GDDR3 onboard memory and is fully compatible with Microsoft's DirectX technology, and is alleged to be able to play Crysis at a decent framerate.

Nvidia's next-gen graphics chipset is built on the 65-nanometer processing node and supports Shader Model 4.0, as well as up to one gigabyte of GDDR3. According to its manufacturer, the graphics card's GPU comes with a 650MHz core speed, 64 stream processors at 1625MHz and 1800MHz, 1GB 256-bit GDDR3 video memory.

"By introducing the SPARKLE GeForce 9600 GT 1GB Graphics Card, SPARKLE once again leads other GeForce 9600 GT vendors in mainstream market." Said Vivian Su, sales manager of SPARKLE Computer Co., Ltd. "With record-breaking 1GB GDDR3 and exclusively designed cooling system, the SPARKLE GeForce 9600 GT 1GB Graphics Card does deliver more performance and value than any other GeForce 9600 GT graphics card on market."

The card also sports Nvidia's second-generation PureVideo HD technology, that can fully offload most of Blu-ray and HD DVD H.264 video decoding from CPU, for an extremely pleasant, noiseless high-definition experience.

The cooling system has also been updated, and Sparkle's own design replaces the stock cooler from the reference design board. The Sparkle GeForce 9600 GT sports an exclusively designed Sun Flower Cooling Fan with the manufacturer's patented technology known as "Cooling Fins Radial Design".The cooler is built using a pressure casing system, that builds the whole radiator in a single step.

Sparkle is also offering a passively-cooled GeForce 9600 GT card, especially suitable for home-theater PCs, as it keeps the noise level to a minimum. The company did not announce pricing or availability information for its latest graphics offerings.